Home Alone in the Trump Administration

President Trump has appointed fewer than three dozen of the top 1,000 officials he needs to run the federal government. Worse, he doesn’t think that’s a problem.

The president seems to have lost interest in the nomination process after making his cabinet and Supreme Court picks, people involved in the transition say. Now, he’s trying to pass off his inattention as some kind of plan. “In many cases, we don’t want to fill those jobs,” he said on Fox News this week. “What do all these people do? You don’t need all those jobs.”

Most incoming administrations move slowly during their first month. Mr. Trump has named only slightly fewer top officials at this point than Bill Clinton, George W. Bush or Barack Obama. But those administrations had scores of candidates in the pipeline by this time. Mr. Trump does not.

The Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization that assists transitions, recommends administrations should fill the top 400 Senate-confirmed agency slots before the August congressional recess. This means the White House has to get cracking, especially to fill roles vital to national security and the economy. It also means that aides like Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway and Reince Priebus might consider expending more effort finding good candidates than competing for Mr. Trump’s attention.

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Members of President Trump’s cabinet attended his speech on Tuesday.CreditStephen Crowley/The New York Times

The National Security Council reflects the chaos: Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser hired after Michael Flynn’s firing, inherited a council of career staff members and nervous, often unqualified Flynn loyalists. The federal agencies are effectively run by Trump “beachhead” teams, some 600 people who mostly are campaign donors, Trump employees, pals or allied politicos. Many know little about the agencies they inhabit, and they are understandably resented by career staff members.

None of this is surprising to people familiar with Mr. Trump’s managerial style, a kind of mom-and-pop approach involving a tiny knot of family members and loyalists that is poorly suited to a federal government with three million employees around the world.

A story about Mr. Trump’s management style in Politico Magazine this week makes for nerve-racking reading: As his business was going bust in the 1990s, it emerged that Mr. Trump didn’t even have a chief financial officer — his lenders forced him to appoint one. The empty desks at the Treasury Department, which is led by Steve Mnuchin, who currently has nobody on his senior leadership team, aren’t exactly an example of lessons learned. Mr. Mnuchin has had his nominees nixed because their views haven’t jibed with those of someone in the White House, or because they have criticized Mr. Trump in the past.

Other cabinet officials, including Rex Tillerson at the State Department, have encountered hurdles at the White House. Shermichael Singleton, a senior adviser to Ben Carson, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, may have set a record by getting fired before his boss’s first day on the job. He was booted for writing critically about Mr. Trump during the campaign. He was replaced by a Trump Organization employee Mr. Carson doesn’t know.

Mr. Trump promised a management mind-set “to make this country great again.” First he needs managers.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: The Very Lonely Cabinet Secretaries. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe